Direct Mail: Creating a Mail Merge

Make the most of Office's Mail Merge for Direct Communication with your Contacts

Updated over a week ago

Direct Mail plays an important part in many campaigns. If you are opting to use it in yours, you might be wondering how you can set about doing this, which we’ll outline below.

The first step in achieving this is to segment your Ecanvasser database to find the contacts you want to send your mail out to. At this stage, you’re likely well used to segmenting your database, but if you need a bit of help, you’ll find information on segmenting your database here.

You could also opt to do your Filtering via the Map tab, and then create a List based on these results.  Once you have completed your segmentation as outlined above, you’ll need to Export Your Data. When doing so, you’ll want to export the following columns:

  • First Name

  • Surname

  • House Unit

  • House Name

  • House Number

  • Street Name

  • City

  • State

  • Zip

Having downloaded your CSV from the documents tab, we’ll want to do a quick bit of restructuring in excel. Assuming you’ve only exported those data points outlined above, this useful template should take care of it all.  Simply copy and paste all of the data from your Ecanvasser Export into the Mail Merge Template’s Data Dump workbook.  Once you do so, within the Mail Merge workbook, select cells A2 through H2, and draw the formulas down the length of the excel to match the number of entries in your export.

Your file is now structured perfectly for making use of MS Word’s Mail Merge functionality.  If you haven’t completed a Mail Merge before, then you’ll definitely want to check out Microsoft’s own support material on this process. Below you’ll find some useful links on completing this; and regardless of what exactly (Letter, Envelope, or Label) you’re trying to mass produce, the very first article is quite informative!

We hope you find this article useful and if you have any questions on any aspect, please feel free to reach out to our Support Team support@ecanvasser.com

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